


A Day in the Life of Mukahi Gakuto

by grayscale



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:25:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayscale/pseuds/grayscale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Gakuto's life can be hard, but he wouldn't trade it for the world.  Companion to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/415185">"Twenty Factors that Shaped Mukahi Gakuto"</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Day in the Life of Mukahi Gakuto

**Author's Note:**

> Another "Twenty Things" meme for Gakuto. This is a companion to "Twenty Factors that Shaped Mukahi Gakuto" and is meant to be read second. Written in 2009.

1) Mukahi Gakuto is not a morning person. He likes sleeping in, if at all possible; he likes being comfortable, doesn't like being woken up before his body naturally wakes. Six days of the week, however, he has to be woken up early, for school, but always puts getting out of bed off until the absolute last moment, and is acerbically unpleasant until his body has fully adjusted to no longer being asleep and he is comfortably awake. 

2) For a multitude of reasons, Gakuto will not drink coffee. Foremostly, it makes him jittery, makes his hands shake, his body tremble, and he can't have that, not when he's going to be throwing himself around, not when he's going to be flying through the air with nothing but his own skill between landing and falling. Though he hates that half-asleep feeling, he refuses to use coffee to rid himself of it, because the chance of an accident at morning practice is infinitely worse.

Besides, Gakuto hates the taste of coffee, and there's no way he's ever going to drink something that he doesn't like. That would be stupid. 

3) Gakuto hates pain. He has an extremely low pain tolerance, a fact which has been apparent since his childhood, when, after being hit by his father, he would cry and cry for hours, extensive even for the four year old he was. At this point, Gakuto was too young, himself, to realize anything beyond his own tear-filled misery, and didn't understand his mother's softly-scolding remark to that effect. 

Later, after discovering his natural flexibility, showing off for the other children at the playground, Gakuto landed a handspring poorly and stumbled, fell, scraping his knee. Despite the iodine and the neosporin and the bandage the nurse gave, despite the assurance that it wouldn't scar and he would be fine, Gakuto continued to be teary-eyed for the rest of the day. Since then, he has always, always landed every handspring perfectly. 

4) Though there are a few classes he enjoys, Gakuto is not good at school. He just isn't, he never has been, and when he realized he never would be, he simply quit worrying about it. After all, his father's and his own mutual desire to keep him out of the house ensures that he will always be welcome at Hyoutei Gakuen (when his grades won't do, a couple of tutoring sessions and a couple thousand yen seem to do the trick). And it isn't like Gakuto's a flunky or something; he usually gets passing marks, if not excellent ones, and when he doesn't, he can just get Yuushi to help him, because Yuushi's good at everything. 

Because he's not really good at school, Gakuto is forced to take notes in class and pay attention, because otherwise, he wouldn't even get the passing marks that he gets. But sometimes, he really just doesn't feel like it, and, a little less than half the time, Gakuto spends class texting his friends, or else doodling on his paper, or else staring out the window and fantasizing. It doesn't really matter, anyway, and he can almost always talk Shishido into letting him copy his notes later. 

5) Gakuto's first favourite subject is Physical Education, because that's the one class in which he actually and honestly excels. To run around, to play games... hell, that's not work, that's fun, and Gakuto can easily enjoy himself, doesn't have to force himself to pay attention. 

6) His second favourite subject is Chemistry, and he tries his hardest to pay attention most of the time, so that he can do cool stuff in the lab. Gakuto has a rather short attention span, so anything that allows him to be involved, to be doing something, is better than sitting in a lecture. 

7) His third favourite subject is English. Gakuto would like to go to America sometime, though he's never been, and so he tries hard to pay attention in English, too, so that he can get what he wants while he's abroad. (Later, when it will become clear to him that he won't be visiting America alone, he stops trying so hard. But that won't be until high school, so for the meantime, he's doing his best.) 

8) Gakuto likes to eat lunch on the roof. He likes to spend time on the roof, in general (he'd like to have sex there, sometime, if he had the opportunity), but with club and things, he really doesn't get the chance except at lunchtime. 

He often tries to recruit people to eat lunch up there with him, but Shishido and Ohtori have some exclusive lunch date thing that they usually do, and Hiyoshi outright refuses with no explanation whatsoever, and the roof is too plebeian for the wonderful Buchou's wonderful self, and so, before Yuushi, Gakuto usually ate lunch alone. He used to tell himself that he didn't really care, but when, upon Gakuto's declaration of his apathy, Yuushi threatened him with an lunch invitation from "that pretty boy in Ohtori's class-- the one with the blonde hair and the blue eyes and those fabulous legs--" Gakuto decided that he did care, very much, indeed. 

9) Gakuto is very vain. He learned, at a rather young age, that if you're not smart, you have to be pretty (though when he first thought it through, he hoped to god that prettiness wouldn't take him where it took his mother), and so he's always done everything to make himself as appealing to boys as he can. He's even considered wearing makeup, a few times, and it irks him that girls can get away with it when boys can't. But he does his best to keep his skin absolutely perfect with two different types of soap and facial scrub and lotion, different from the various moisturizing and scented lotions he keeps for various other parts of his body. 

As to his hair, Gakuto saw a style like it in an American movie once, on a woman who seduced lots of men and got what she wanted because of it. He was captivated, and once he was allowed to make his own choices, he got his hair cut like that, too, in hopes that he'd be able to do that sort of thing, as well. He was very pleased with it, and never broke the habit of running to the bathroom between classes to check that it was still perfectly styled. Never mind that the movie was set in the 1920s; beauty, Gakuto thought to himself, pleased, every time he felt his hair swish against his cheeks, was timeless. 

10) When it comes to how he feels, Gakuto tends to be honest, and more often than not, he feels dissatisfied with something. He has a feeling the Regulars have learned to ignore his constant dissatisfaction with his classes and his teachers and the food at lunch and the annoying kid who sits in front of him and raises his hand too often, but that doesn't stop Gakuto from informing everyone, anyway, that he hates when it gets cold out and then his skin dries and he has to bring lotion with him to practice--

Really, it's because he never got to say any of it, as a child, that he's constantly saying it now. When he was at home, he had no one to complain to; he learned very young not to speak his dissatisfaction to his father or face punishment, and when he mentioned his unhappiness to his mother, she only looked away, an expression that may have been guilt playing across her delicate, worn features, and so Gakuto knew better than to try again. And so now, now that he can without fear, Gakuto freely voices what he wants, and often. 

11) With the same reasoning, Gakuto really loves to get what he wants. He loves nothing more than to be spoiled, for things to come easy, to be waited on. "Princess," Shishido's called him before, and though Gakuto stuck his tongue out and responded with some entirely clever comeback like, "your mom," it really is the truth. Gakuto isn't someone who feels better after working for something, and he doesn't have too much pride to accept handouts. Summer days when he lays on Yuushi's bed until two pm and then lets Yuushi bring him things instead of getting them himself are the best, in his personal opinion. 

But though Gakuto loves getting what he wants, he knows better than to expect it. He takes great joy in getting spoiled, yes, and he always has, but he never used to, and so, though he doesn't let it show, he is still, even now, a little bit surprised when things do go exactly his way. 

12) Gakuto's self esteem when it comes to his own skills wavers and fluctuates like a sin curve. On the good days, the days when he gets two flips into his Moon Saults before landing them impeccably, the days when he can return any ball (except the ones Yuushi gets, of course), he is above everyone, he's full of taunts and full of himself; he truly believes he can beat anyone. 

On the bad days, when he's clumsy and ends up scraping his palms on bad landings and all of his shots are just out, he's acerbic, lashes out at anyone and everyone like a caged animal, and, though he pretends he's just as confident as ever, inside, he hates himself with the white hot intensity that is usually reserved only for his father, because at times likes these, he knows his father is right-- he just isn't good enough. 

13) Gakuto is a shameless procrastinator. When he doesn't want to do something, he just doesn't, and he feels absolutely no guilt when, 11 pm the night before a due date, he ends up begging and pleading Shishido for the answers, and when that doesn't pan out, he comes crawling back to Yuushi, who will usually give out to his cutest pout, in the end. 

14) Because he's never doing his homework, after tennis practice, Gakuto likes to do what pleases him. Usually, that's going out for coffee or juice with someone from the team, but sometimes, he watches tv, sometimes he goes to the gym or the dance studios to work out, sometimes he allows Shishido and Ohtori to take him to a sports game or Yuushi to drag him to a chick flick. 

When people ask him why he has such poor time management, he blames it on "strict parents when he was at home." Sometimes, he believes it. Sometimes, he's willing to admit that he's just lazy. 

15) Before Yuushi, Gakuto was extremely promiscuous. In elementary school, he was the kid who the other boys could always get to play the part of the princess or the dog, because he wanted to be a part of the group, wanted the attention badly enough to forsake his own desires. When he graduated to middle school, he was surprised to find that, all of a sudden, he was the one with whom other boys assumed they could get anything, and, he discovered, to be desirable was all right. Like being pretty was helpful, he realized, being apt at seduction would probably be helpful, too, and so he went along with it all. 

It started out with kissing early on, in the bathrooms or behind the school. He was self conscious at first, with no experience at all, but, it turned out, most of the other boys didn't either, and Gakuto soon learned what it was they wanted, how to get a good reaction out of them. And it wasn't just pleasing people; Gakuto found, he liked it all, too, very much--he didn't mind at all being on the receiving end, really. It felt good, which was a bit of an added bonus. But of course, as with most things of that sort, it snowballed; Gakuto found he was spending more and more time pressed against walls by and on his knees in front of other boys until one afternoon, after practice, he went back to one of the upperclassmen's rooms with him and stayed the night. 

He had thought, beforehand, that, afterwards, he would feel empowered, would feel wanted, but honestly, as he limped back to his room in the early hours of the next morning, he just felt sore and tired. It certainly didn't help to overhear at morning practice that very same senior joking with one of his friends about how he had "finally scored with that easy freshman." But he wasn't really sure what to do about it, because it was this or being alone, right?

16) It was when he limped out on the tennis courts and, almost immediately, Yuushi asked him if he was all right, that Gakuto realized that, perhaps there was another option. 

17) Still, despite the fact that he has been dating Yuushi for more than two years now, sometimes, boys will still hit on him, still flirt with him after school, and, though he'd never tell, sometimes, when Yuushi isn't around, Gakuto flirts back. Just for the fun of it, of course; he'd never, ever cheat on Yuushi. But he misses it, sometimes, having such a sway on any, every boy he happened to set his eyes on. He tells himself it's to keep his skills sharp, just in case, even though, whenever he's wrapped up in Yuushi's arms, he's pretty sure he's not ever going to need them again. 

18) Gakuto isn't really a picky eater when it comes to foods; he likes most items, dishes, but he is rather picky about quality. Too hot, too cold, too stiff, too soft, too cheap, too tough, too limp, too firm... that's the beginning of the list of his most common complaints, and while, most of the time, he eats it anyway, he begins almost every meal in the dining hall complaining about the food. 

When Yuushi takes him out to a fancy restaurant for dinner, Gakuto never complains about the food. Even if he doesn't like it, he won't say anything, because, despite what he says, he knows Yuushi is the one person who always listened to, acknowledges his complaints, and, despite his enigmatic exterior, he knows Yuushi will be hurt. And so he never says anything about the food, and finds something else that happened earlier in the day to complain about instead. 

19) Gakuto spends almost every evening with Yuushi. Sometimes, Yuushi helps him with his homework, sometimes they watch a movie, sometimes they sit and talk. Sometimes, Yuushi will come to his room, and sometimes, he'll go to Yuushi's, but regardless, every evening is the same, in that this is the time they spend together, always, as a couple. 

Though they're always very physical (Gakuto knows Yuushi takes malicious joy in making out in the club room, just to unsettle Buchou, but Gakuto personally prefers the times when Yuushi will grab his ass out on the courts, just to see if anyone will notice), it is during these evening hours that they are the most platonically affectionate, holding the other close without any sexual undercurrent whatsoever. After all, they both know what the later hours will bring, and there's no rush, so Yuushi will hold Gakuto to his chest, or Gakuto will rest his head on Yuushi's shoulder, easy, relaxed, simple. Neither of them really care for this sort of thing regularly, but in this brief window, to collect themselves, to unwind, it's just about perfect. 

20) Gakuto has sex approximately 1.8 times a day, which roughly translates to about once on weeknights and more on the weekends, or days when they cut class to meet up in one of the storage closets during school hours. But at least once a day is given; at the end of the evening, Yuushi will always press Gakuto into the bed and press their bodies together and press a kiss to his lips, and though it's routine, to Gakuto, this will never, ever get old. 

21) The sex itself, of course, is not routine. Gakuto would never stand for that, and he knows Yuushi wouldn't, either-- things have to be new, exciting, or else they get boring! Gakuto likes it a lot when he gets to be on top, with Yuushi's fingers digging into his hips like he'll never let go, because he can look down and see Yuushi's flushed face and _know_ that he's the one to make him lose his careful control this way, he's the one, he's the only one. 

22) Of course, he also likes it when Yuushi pins him down against the bed and pulls his legs up so that his knees are almost beside his head and spreads his thighs wide and murmurs into his ear that he's just so _cute_ \-- Gakuto likes that a lot, too, likes it very much, in a different sort of way. 

23) Of course, Gakuto pretty much adores anything Yuushi does to him, so perhaps it's a moot point. 

24) Gakuto knows, however, that he loves everything about afterwards, when he's wrapped up tight in Yuushi's arms and Yuushi will run a hand through his hair a few times before kissing him on the forehead and telling him good night. This is what he never had when he could have any boy he wanted; this is perfect, this is being loved, and Gakuto wouldn't trade it for the world.


End file.
